BOSTON (CBS) – Tonight at 7 on WBZ-TV, WBZ NewsRadio 1030 and CBS Boston.com, I’ll be moderating the final Boston debate between Stephen Lynch and Ed Markey before primary election day a week from tomorrow. And I urge you to watch or listen to it, as a partial preview of a debate our entire country is about to have over national security issues.

Nearly twelve years after 9/11, we know that there’s a lot we can do to prevent attacks by terrorists, foreign and domestic.

Listen to Jon’s commentary:

Keller at Large April 22, 2013

From Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber, in December of 2001, through last fall’s bust of a creep who wanted to blow up the Federal Reserve building in New York, I count almost 30 of them.

And those are only the ones we know about.

But what happened last week reminds us of our vulnerability and raises an important question – should we be doing more?

The problem is, there is no serious course of action that doesn’t raise as many questions as it answers.

If we spend more money on intelligence-gathering equipment, will it be money well spent?

Law enforcement is the toast of the town right now, with good reason, but no one can reasonably argue that there hasn’t been a lot of waste in the anti-terror spending spree that followed 9/11.

Some say we need more aggressive reporting of suspicious behavior by citizens, but remember that the older brother had aroused enough suspicion to be questioned and investigated by the FBI, without pre-emptive action.

And do we really want to take another step toward a police-state culture, where any deviations from the “norm” become fodder for casual dime-dropping?

Watch or listen to the debate tonight and see how Lynch and Markey address the issues. Because their debate is just the first of many that will define the way we live for many years to come.

You can listen to Keller At Large on WBZ News Radio every weekday at 7:55 a.m. You can also watch Jon on WBZ-TV News.